Site Mobile Navigation

ART; Mementos of a Moment and Its Movements

''THERE'S more of everything,'' proclaims the slogan emblazoned across ''Watts 1963,'' a painting by Kerry James Marshall evoking the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Los Angeles, where he moved at age 8, in that politically and culturally momentous year. Those words are just one element in an elaborate interplay between realities and ideals in the 1995 painting's depiction of the project as a place of unexpected bliss. But they could also describe the modus operandi of an artist best known for grand, brilliantly realized canvases like this one, a visually and emotionally loaded meditation on black American life.

In his newest work, however, Mr. Marshall has let his idea of ''more'' jump off the canvas into three dimensions, and given it an even more specific historical focus as well. Admirers who see the artist as a flag bearer for painting -- echoing his own assessment in a recent conversation that ''the work I've done has demonstrated the viability of this art in a hostile critical climate where the idea of painting is often discredited'' -- may be taken aback by the apparent change.

The new work is featured in ''Mementos,'' his first New York museum exhibition, which opens Friday at the Brooklyn Museum, where it is supplemented by a small selection of works dating from 1994 to 1996. A somewhat different version of ''Mementos'' was shown last spring at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.

Although it includes four large bannerlike paintings, ''Mementos'' is a single installation, or suite of works, that also contains sculpture, photography, prints and video, all of which evoke images and slogans associated with the racial struggles of the 60's. The prints trumpet phrases ranging from ''We shall overcome'' to ''Burn, baby, burn.'' The paintings memorialize icons from musicians like the rhythm-and-blues singer Otis Redding and the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane to the men the artist calls ''the holy trinity of the civil rights movement'': Martin Luther King Jr. and John and Robert Kennedy.

In the paintings, such images are set within the spaces of black middle-class living rooms. By focusing on past events, people or ideas, not so much for their own sake as on the way they are commemorated and ceremonially invoked in the present, the artist seems to imply that they've been rendered innocuous, even kitschy. Stylistically, too, the works quote the 60's. The sculptural elements, for instance, include giant, Claes Oldenburg-style rubber stamps, from which the prints of the slogans were made.

Mr. Marshall dismisses the idea that this mixed-media extravaganza represents a shift of position, recalling that Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo considered it ''not incompatible to do paintings, architecture, weapons development, poetry, and do all of them very well.'' His determination to branch out in this way may have been encouraged by another of the resonant slogans in ''Mementos,'' this one from Malcolm X: ''By any means necessary.''

''Artists like Leonardo were engaged in an inquisitive pursuit that employed a lot of tools that we now consider art, but at the time were simply means to an end, though not without philosophical intent,'' Mr. Marshall says. The point, he says, has been ''to avoid forcing into a painting structure things that are not best explored in that manner.''

Perhaps it was inevitable that this particular artist would take on the subject of the 60's, and in particular the memory of the competing yet intertwined movements for civil rights and for black power. After all, a black child born in 1955 whose childhood took him from Birmingham, Ala. -- where four schoolgirls were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church -- to Watts, where one of the decade's most notorious riots took place, might be forgiven for seeing himself as the chosen witness to a heroic yet tragic history.

''I was aware of the things going on then,'' says Mr. Marshall, in a voice still redolent of his Alabama origins, ''but I had no way to contextualize them. This work was a way of coming to terms with a part of my personal history I couldn't deal with before now, but also of coming to terms with a historical moment that still resonates. And to talk about a historical distance, a remove from the volatility things had at the time.'' His intention was not to document a period, he explains, but to create a space in which people can come to terms with that time.''

Of course, innumerable lives were touched by those events, but no one else would have tried to engage them in the disparate visual languages exemplified by Leonardo and Marcel Duchamp, the artists Mr. Marshall cites as the exemplars of his conception of art as ''an inquisitive pursuit into perception and culture.'' So it's not surprising that the Chicago-based critic Kathryn Hixson wrote in the art journal Trans>Arts.Cultures.Media, after a visit to Mr. Marshall's studio, ''There is something grandiose about Marshall's embrace of the great tradition, a pride that may be repellent but, here, is completely seductive.'' Mr. Marshall has lived in Chicago since 1987 and teaches at the University of Illinois campus there.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Ms. Hixson is hardly the only viewer to have been beguiled by Mr. Marshall's unfashionable ambition. The demise of mastery and masterpieces having been proclaimed many times over, the art world may not be ready for the next Renaissance man, yet Mr. Marshall has tried on the role anyway. Since 1993, when he painted ''The Lost Boys,'' which he considers his first mature painting, and had his first solo exhibition in New York as well as one in Los Angeles, his career has been in precipitous ascent, culminating last year in his inclusion in the Whitney Biennial (after not making the cut two years before) and the prestigious international exhibition Documenta X in Kassel, Germany (where he was one of only three artists to show paintings on canvas), as well his receipt of one of the MacArthur Foundation's ''genius'' grants.

While Mr. Marshall's swift emergence and acceptance recalls that of other 90's Wunderkinder like Matthew Barney and Jason Rhoades, the difference is that he was not in his 20's but already nearing 40 when this happened, with a long period of quiet, steadfast development to back it up. ''In order to do something worthwhile in painting,'' he says, ''it takes a long time to get to the point where you're ready to do it. You have to know the history, not just rhetorically but materially, technically as well as philosophically. You have to practice painting a lot to get that to work. But what makes it come alive is the way you synthesize it with a bunch of other things that come into it from outside.''

After graduating from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1978, Mr. Marshall began working his way from Cubist-influenced collages toward abstract painting and eventually a style that included shadowy, schematic figures. He began to wonder, he says, ''what happens if I take that fragmented Cubist space and put back everything the Cubists left out?'' -- a question that finally led to the more fully fleshed-out imagery he uses now. At the same time he was also working in film as a production designer, most notably for Julie Dash's ''Daughters of the Dust'' in 1989.

Not surprisingly, considering the long gestation that led to his current work, Mr. Marshall bridles at critics who have overemphasized its relation to outsider art, asserting instead his intention to ''operate inside the discourse of art-making but outside the art world.'' His portrayals of incongruously Edenic housing projects like Nickerson Gardens in ''The Garden Project'' series in 1995, may have had an air of folk art, but a closer look showed reminiscences of the early Renaissance mixed with a broad range of modernist strategies -- clearly the work of a broadly educated artist.

''If you look at what the art world is doing,'' Mr. Marshall says, ''you have a certain idea of what's valuable; in the moment, you see a lot of things described as something -- the fact that somebody used paint makes it a painting. But if you're interested in the discourse of painting, that's not enough. There are other issues to be dealt with to be part of the discourse of painting. I didn't simply want to use paint. I wanted the work to be about painting.''

But not just painting. ''I don't think an artist can do just one thing,'' he continues. ''All the categories are traps -- painting, sculpture, conceptual, landscape. What's really valuable is not in any of these external modifiers, but in the relation you establish between the medium or form and the concept.'' Yet there may be more of a contradiction than Mr. Marshall is willing to admit between his desire to be seen ''not as 'the painter' but as an artist'' and his passion for the ''material involvement in the process,'' which is so much more easily fulfilled in a traditional medium like painting than in more distanced, directorial modes like installations and video. In that light it is interesting that -- after Mr. Marshall has been the object of so much attention from the news media over the last few years -- the response to the Chicago showing of ''Mementos'' has been surprisingly subdued.

A reviewer in the current issue of New Art Examiner, the Chicago-based regional art magazine, observes that ''The works in other media in this exhibition seem weaker than the paintings.'' As a result, others have observed, the work's tone was unsettled, the attitude conveyed toward its subject unclear.

Can it be that the artist has finally overreached himself, that ''more'' has finally become ''too much''? Mr. Marshall's step into the realm of mixed-media installation could be an unproductive detour or a fruitful expansion.